Drying clothes on the line in the winter
I hear from a lot of folks
who give up on drying
their clothes outside
in the winter. But once you buy a dryer, there's often no turning
back. First you toss your clothes in the dryer on frigid January
days, but soon even an overcast spell in June has you visiting the
indoor energy hog instead of just waiting for pretty weather.
Since I stubbornly
refuse to set foot on that slippery slope, I'm stuck drying our clothes
outside all winter...and it's really no big deal. The waterline
froze the night before I chose to start our November laundry, so I
couldn't fill the wringer
washer until mid
afternoon, but our clean clothes still dripped most of the moisture out
that evening before freezing solid overnight. As soon as the sun
came out, they were sublimating moisture even from their frozen
surfaces, and then the sunny afternoon thawed the fabric enough that I
could flip each item over. That night, I put away all except the
heaviest towels, jeans, and fleece tops, and the next evening
everything was ready to come in.
Yes, it technically took
a bit over 48 hours to dry our clothes, but what's the hurry? Your annual estimated savings from hanging clothes on the line is
$100 for the equipment (depreciating value of the dryer) plus $150 in
electricity, and the extra work during extended winter drying amounts to no more time than you'd spend checking a rising loaf of bread.
Do you dry clothes
outside in the winter? Do you have any tips for folks who want to
try but are afraid of the cold?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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The only problem I see with drying clothes outside in winter, it the actual process of hanging them up. All that water plus the cold, means your fingers are going to hurt. I recommend wearing rubber gloves while hanging up clothes. It keeps the water and wind off your fingers, which helps quite a lot in the pain department. We'll be washing and drying clothes outside all winter this year, and we've done it before. Sure, it takes and extra day or two to dry, but if you have plenty of clothes, it's really not a problem. We only do small loads of laundry at a time, and our line is pretty much always in use. As soon as one load comes down from the line, we wash another load and it goes up.
Maybe, Anna, you need to convince readers that it IS possible to get the wind up, with that chant! The benefits of hanging out clothes are, mostly, that you get outdoors for fresh air--even more beneficial than saving the drying money! About keeping fingers warm--try wearing 2 pairs of gloves, with the inner pair the stretchy light-weight kind, and the outer the kind of heavy cloth work gloves with a gripping texture, or, better yet, brown jersey work gloves. And make sure you have your clothes sorted by kind (socks, undies, T-shirts, etc) so you can get them hung up as fast as possible. Folding the sheets in 4ths in the house also speeds things up, as you can quickly unfold, to hang. If you don't have sun all day on the clothesline, hang the more needed things on the sunniest side.
Using the house at night, with a line high up,is a fast dry for most things.
I remember my mother's story of how she, at near 90, in South Weymouth, Mass. tripped and fell, going down a bank slippery with snow in the winter. She was wearing a long wool winter coat, and just slid on down to the clothesline, which she was able to grab onto and pull herself up by--she even had her clothesbasket still with her! She did make it back up the bank, by going in untrodden snow. She always kept her clothespins in a clothespin bag, which she would hang around her neck. then she would bring the clothespin bag inside, to use if needed in the house. Last--I think that clothes dried out outside are healthier, as they are certainly fresher, and have been purified by the sun, wind, and cold, if dried in winter.
The 1000 RPM spin cycle on my washing machine gets most of the water out. Clothes that don't hold a lot of water like a fleece sweater I could probably wear straight out of the washer if I needed to.
So in the winter I just put the washing on a drying rack in the spare room. It is usually dry the next day. Since I rarely have more than one wash per week, I don't see why I should bother with a dryer.
When I first came to Japan, I asked my host family where their clothes dryer was. She just looked at me like I was a crazy person. Then I realized that almost nobody has one here.
Instead of clotheslines, they have multiple thin wall stainless steel pipes outside their south windows or balconies. You can hang futon from it, and it is just the right size for multiple hangers as well (like ten hangers perfectly spaced that have a single hanger on top, another type has 25-30 clothespins hanging down from a 1x2' frame). The balconies usually have a small overhang and the clothes can hang outside even during a normal rain. Works great and the UV light kills a lot of odor causing bacteria on towels and the like as well. And as a bonus, with the multiple hangers you can put all the clothes on the hangers indoors, then just hang them outside without freezing fingers.